


sell one soul (to save another)

by Leaf-Groot (Tavina)



Series: the world will hear us roar [3]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Dreaming of Sunshine - Silver Queen
Genre: F/M, Gen, Madness thy name is Tywin, Rhaella POV, Rhaella is very confused, Shikako spends time choking on tea and other tales, The Lannister Twins, Threats of violence towards Aerys, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-12
Updated: 2020-04-12
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:54:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23618587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tavina/pseuds/Leaf-Groot
Summary: Rhaella Targaryen was born a princess destined to be a queen. And yet, and yet, she never expected to be a queen to a second king.But between her soul and her son’s, she knows which one would fetch the higher price.The story of Rhaella, the last dragon queen.
Relationships: Tywin Lannister & Nara Shikako, Tywin Lannister/Rhaella Targaryen
Series: the world will hear us roar [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1604410
Comments: 25
Kudos: 408
Collections: Heliocentrism — a Dreaming of Sunshine recursive collection





	sell one soul (to save another)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kitsunesongs](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kitsunesongs/gifts).



She’d felt _something_ when she saw Jocelyn Lannister walk through the door of the Maidenvault, saw the way that red dripped from her former lady-in-waiting’s gown, the golden lions, the pale, unblemished skin.

She’d felt something, because she knew that this sight meant that Aerys was dead, the war was lost, and soon she would be lost with it.

Her son, fast asleep on the other side of the room, would be lost as well.

And of all the things she could not bear, perhaps this was the heaviest of them.

Aerys was dead, and there was grief there, but less, less perhaps than she should feel for a brother, a husband, a _king._

No, instead Aerys is dead, and all she feels is a vague sense of guilt-stricken relief, even if it means that all is lost.

But Rhaegar? Her own precious boy is a child still. Not in any part complicit in the crimes that had started this war, though now he would have to share in the burden of ending it.

Jocelyn takes a seat across from her at the table, folds her hands together, sets them on the table. “And you? How have you been, Rhaella?”

Lady Jocelyn had been one of her favorite ladies-in-waiting when she’d still lived in the capital.

Other ladies might pander towards her brother, thinking it would earn them a little bit of glory, a little something that could not be gained from the pallor of the queen and her dimming interest in the affairs at court.

The King could be courteous. The King could dazzle. The King could be charismatic and witty when he wasn’t rage and bloody deeds.

The Queen was weak-willed, and kept to herself, silent and withdrawn. If not timid and cowed by her brother-husband, then disinterested and kept her own counsel.

For all the mottos of her house, Rhaella has never been a dragon.

Other ladies might pander and flirt, but never Jocelyn Lannister. Jocelyn was quiet most of the time, green eyes observing, speaking when it served a purpose to, intelligence never hidden in the warmth of her smile. No, Jocelyn had saved her warm smiles for her twin brother and the ones sharp like daggers in the dark for other lords.

Rhaella had liked her sometimes dry wit and unhidden intelligence. But Aerys had seen her figure, the way her gowns hugged her curves, the dainty gold chain she wore about her throat, rubies flashing in her hair nets — he had seen emeralds in her eyes but not the fire beneath, thought her pretty, and wanted to bed her, making whores out of his sister’s ladies in some form of sick amusement.

Lady Jocelyn refusing him had at first confused him, then amused him, then roused him, then finally, when Lord Tywin ripped up a royal decree in Casterly Rock, enraged him.

Lord Tytos had called his eldest children home after some five years at court, but Rhaella had been sad to see Jocelyn go. There were few confidants for the queen whose brother glittered with charm and madness.

“You’re not here to ask me that.” No, Jocelyn wasn’t here for that at all, despite coming here mostly alone.

There were Lannister guardsmen outside, ready at a moment’s notice.

She has no weapons. It isn’t an overt display of force, but it’s a threat all the same.

“You’re here to ask me to surrender.”

Sign a document. Surrender the dynasty.

Two hundred and sixty-four years, and now they ask Rhaella to sign a piece of paper that would lay waste to it all.

But did the dynasty not lose itself with the Dance?

Did it not die with the dragons?

Did their house not tremble in the fire and flame of Summerhall’s destruction?

Is this not a final roar but a whimper, in the grand scheme of it all?

Jocelyn considers the statement for a moment. “I am here to ask that.” _You’ll have to forgive me._ Her green eyes say. “My brother cannot sit easily on the throne when there are loyalists.”

And Jocelyn would never leave her brother undefended.

The Lannister Twins had come to court together. Rhaella remembers the day that they did, the lady answering before the heir, how young lord Tywin had almost smiled — but only just — how the lords and ladies had been surprised.

She’d asked Jocelyn afterwards, wondered at it.

_Do you like him? Your brother, I mean._

_I do. He’s my favorite brother._

“Why would I help your brother?” _Why would I throw my lot with those who would have me and my son killed for it?_

Tywin Lannister may have won the throne, but could he sit on it without it cutting?

Perhaps not.

Perhaps not.

* * *

It doesn’t take too long for a Lannister guardsman to come retrieve her from her tower. Rhaegar had awakened, but a golden haired man she does not recognize arrives with a golden haired boy and occupies her child even if all she wants is to never let her son out of her sight.

Jocelyn has a dry wit and an unbridled intelligence, but there is a kindness to her, at least to those who had not earned her ire. A boy of five could not earn that ire.

Lord Tywin is a far different story, with the same shrewd intelligence but rage so wild barely contained beneath his skin. What Tywin Lannister will or will not deem necessary is an uncertain minefield.

“‘Plogies, your highness” the Lannister man says.

She can see it now, the Lannister in him, not just in the gold of his hair and the green of his eyes, but the cut of his jaw, the way he held himself even though slightly apologetic. “My elder brother wants to see you in his solar. So Gery and I thought to come to visit Prince Rhaegar.”

So this is one of the brothers of Tywin Lannister.

She’d always known that the Lannister Twins had other siblings, had heard about it from other people’s conversations and read about it in letters and official royal documents, but these other siblings of the insular Lannister twins seemed to be as diaphanous as Myrish silk, a see through people, not truly fully formed.

But clearly, this man is indeed, made of flesh and blood, not Myrish silk dissolving in water.

 _Do I get to choose? Where does safety lie, if it does not lie in barring the door until both I and Rhaegar starve?_ she wonders, before rising to go. “Then I suppose I ought not keep him waiting.” She strides past him, her spine straight and chin raised, and forgets, in her fear, that Tywin Lannister’s younger brother called her ‘your highness,’ as he might’ve done when she was still a queen.

* * *

She sets the pages she’d been handed down on the table before her.

“I have no maidenhead to give you.” She lifts her chin, looks him in the eye. The calculation she sees in his eyes, bright as emerald, scares her more than the glittering madness she’d seen in her brother’s.

Aerys Targaryen had not been an intelligent man. He’d been handsome, charismatic when he chose, but never quite intelligent — there were ways she could hide, both her thoughts and her person, from Aerys.

Tywin Lannister would offer her no ground.

A corner of his mouth tilts down for the briefest of moments as though he’d heard a particularly funny jape. “I’m aware.” The way amusement has snaked its way across his face is not subtle. “Really, your highness, you speak like I have no idea where children come from.” _And you have had one and miscarried another._

His words are sarcastic, but enough on this side of polite that she had no ability to refute them.

 _Your highness,_ he’d called her.

 _Your highness,_ as though she were still a queen.

“I don’t understand.” She was the wife of the king he’d put to the sword.

Her son’s fate, as of this moment, was unknown, but still the contract on the table between them said marriage.

He takes a seat before the fire. Most of what she sees is the outline of his profile, the way firelight fell over his angular cheekbones, the shine of his golden curls, the reflection of green eyes, lips pressed together to a thin line, the sharp cut of his jawline.

Even seated, even relatively quiet, — _contained,_ she thinks _this is a man who could only be contained briefly —_ Tywin Lannister is a _storm._ A storm with skin.

“What don’t you understand?” he says, almost amicably.

“Why offer terms?” Why offer _these_ terms?

“Well,” he says, observing her for a moment, the same way a cat might watch a—a mouse. “did you want the other option? Because that can be arranged.”

But by the handwritten contract on the desk between them, he did not consider this a trivial matter. “You never seemed like a man who cared for another’s leavings.”

He shrugs, a smooth, languid motion. “If this must be the path to peace, then quite frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

And that tells her as much as doesn’t.

“My son?” she asks. “What of him?”

“Would he threaten his own brother?” Tywin turns to her, lazy in assessment even though she knows he is anything but. When he’d been in King’s Landing, his had been the hand that tempered and managed Aerys’ plans. “If not, I doubt that I have reason to care.”

She does not believe him, because he is too proud to bear this with any particular grace, and yet it is grace he offers.

How could she hope for anything better than what has been offered?

There is nothing better, so she bows her head and signs.

* * *

“He is not terrible.” Jocelyn tells her, when they take tea together, a week before the wedding is to happen. “Ty would never mistreat you.”

Tywin Lannister has enough self control to contain the storm trapped beneath his skin, it is true.

Rhaella raises her teacup to her lips mechanically and wonders how to reassure the woman before her, how to express her sincerity, her son’s life depended on her sincerity being believed. “I would not mind,” she says at last. “If you were the first wife.” _I will not mind standing in your shadow if that is what it takes for my son to be saved._

Jocelyn chokes on her tea. “What?” she asks, after she has stopped coughing.

“Is that not why he ripped up A-aerys’ letter?” She stumbles over her brother’s name. It’d been years since she used it, but now Aerys is dead, and she is alive, and intends to stay that way. “There were so many whispers.”

Jocelyn’s face has turned a bright shade of scarlet.

Perhaps she is not supposed to say this, perhaps she is supposed to pretend that she knew nothing of it, but she’s already opened her mouth, so she best see it through now. “I don’t mind if he loves you better, if he loves your children more, I—”

“Ty never wanted to marry me, and I have no desire or intention to marry him.” Jocelyn reaches across the table, takes her hand. “We’re to be sisters, not sister-wives, Rhaella. My family will be yours.”

“But he had intended to wed before—” before her brother had sent a raven and started a war, there were rumblings of wedding preparations in Casterly Rock. Who else could they have been for?

At this, Jocelyn hesitates, a shadow falling over her face. “He did, yes, to our cousin, Joanna.”

At this, Rhaella finally understands.

Aerys had taken the wedding preparations for Tywin without realizing which lady he’d intended to be his bride, and had thus under false assumption, made an offer that ended their house forever.

If that doesn’t taste like blood and ash, Rhaella doesn’t know what would.

* * *

“I am not a dragon,” she admits.

Tywin observes her for another moment more, a devilish look in his eyes. “Not a dragon, no.” He lays a hand against her cheek — a gesture tender for his sisters, but strangely bereft of anything for her at all — and brushes a strand of her hair behind her ear. “No, I’d rather call you mouse.”

And something settles.

* * *

There is a wedding, on the steps of the Great Sept of Baelor, before the first snows fall.

Rhaella stands with bare shoulders, a gown of ivory samite with sleeves so long they nearly dragged on the floor, without a single dragon motif, no cloak despite the chill until Tywin Lannister cloaks her with a cloak that drips with red, magnificent golden lions embroidered on gleaming red silks.

She wonders if this cloak had originally been made for Joanna Lannister.

The gown had not, for she had seen the cloth before seamstresses from the Westerlands had cut it.

There is a wedding. The city turned out to see the spectacle.

Years ago, she had stood, the bride in another wedding, in a gown of white silks, a black cloak about her shoulders traded for another one, equally black.

Myrish lace had scratched at her throat, and she could barely keep herself from weeping.

And even if the man she pledges herself to this time blazes with gold instead of silver, green eyes instead of purple, she wonders if her entire life is to be this same sort of mummery.

* * *

“He _marked you_.” The words are hissed, brandished like a whip, and it burns like the strike of one too.

She watches his hands, the way they grip the back of the chair before him, knuckles bleached white, hears the wooden beneath those iron fingers creak.

Would this be the final breaking point? She’d told him she is no maiden, but he’d known that already. This however, is something she took care to hide from the world. In a way, that had made Aerys delight as well, obsessed he was in owning her, in body if not in soul.

He’d delighted in creating scars that she could cover, threatened her with the idea of drawing on her in places she could not.

She raises her eyes to the livid fury of Tywin Lannister, chair still creaking beneath his harsh grip. “He did.”

What else could she say? It is not as if the only time he’d see her would be in darkness. It is not as if this is a secret that could be hidden forever.

Something in his visage twists, and twists, and _twists,_ and she’d never felt more fearful.

Slowly, he pries his fingers from the chair, one by one, and makes his way towards her in measured steps, boots ringing on the stone. “If he were not dead, I would quite like to run him through again. More slowly this time.”

He offers her a hand, eyes a wildfire green, and charisma more blinding than the sun, and strangely, she feels like taking that hand would be like selling her soul.

There are no better terms than this.

She takes his hand anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> This was really fun to write! (and has been sitting in my drive for a few months now as I worked on it off and on.) I think I like how it turned out.
> 
> I think there's going to be these next installments: 
> 
> 1\. gold and frail sunlight (and the whole world holds its breath)  
> 2\. false is thy coat (but oh, how it shines)  
> 3\. king and lionheart (we're still the same)
> 
> And I swear then I'll be _done_. Hopefully.


End file.
